I am excited to present to you my summer 2016 research proposal. While previous research has shown that isolated Echinacea plants and populations experience reduced reproductive fitness, we have not looked at what influence edge effects may have on Echinacea populations. Findings presented in Ison and Wagenius 2014 showed that plants in P1 experienced slight edge effects on seed set. My research this summer will use style persistence data collected from all remnant sites and quantify the relationship between distance of an Echinacea plant from a habitat edge and average style persistence. This will help us understand if fragmented populations are being harmed by yet another factor. Hopefully you find this topic as interesting as I do.
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Beginning in 1996, Team Echinacea has monitored the flowering phenology of Echinacea angustifolia in remnant populations around Solem Township. The number of populations and plants we visit has varied over the years; a summary of which populations were monitored in each year can be found at this link. In 2015, we monitored phenology of 1763 heads on 1384 plants at 27 remnant populations. Whew! That is about 400 more flowering individuals than in 2014 although we monitored the same populations. Populations with big increases in numbers of flowering individuals from last year include Aanenson, East Riley, Landfill, and On 27. At each population, we identify all flowering individuals and track their development over the course of the season, gathering data on start and end dates of flowering for every individual. Flowering began at Loeffler’s Corner on June 23rd and ended at Aanenson on August 19th. We will use this data to describe temporal flowering patterns within and among remnants and relate this to potential for successful mating in populations.  Blue line segments indicate the period of time that at least one individual was flowering at each population. The numbers to the left of the lines indicate the number of individuals that flowered from each population in 2015. Click to enlarge! Look here to read previous flog posts about this experiment. Start year: 1996 Locations: roadsides, railroad rights of way, and nature preserves in and near Solem Township, MN Overlaps with: mating compatibility in remnants, demography in remnants, phenology in experimental plots Team members who have worked specifically on this project include: Amber Zahler (2011), Kelly Kapsar (2012), and Sarah Baker (2013), although gathering phenology data was a whole team effort in 2014 and 2015. Flog posts authored by Kelly, Amber, and other team members may provide additional details about day-to-day activities associated with our flowering phenology monitoring project. For her RET project, Lea gathered data to study the relationship between flowering density and seed set. She worked at Staffanson Prairie Preserve, which appears to have higher flowering density in burn years than non-burn years. This year, 2015, was a non-burn year. Lea and Team Echinacea kept track of the style persistence of about 50 individuals for which we have seed set information from prior burn years. These individuals were harvested and their achene count and seed set will be assessed in winter 2016 by Gordon Younkin, an undergraduate intern from Northwestern University. Gordon will work to build a model of seed set in Staffanson in a non-burn year and aims to compare this model to a burn year.
Site: Staffanson Prairie Preserve Start year: 1996 Location: Staffanson Prairie Preserve Overlaps with: phenology in remnants, phen for aii Products: Lea is developing a dataset and lesson plan for high-school students to compare individual plants’ style persistence in burn years and non-burn years to test hypotheses about seed set in high- and low- flowering density. This lesson will introduce students to R and its use in data management and statistical analysis. Read other flog posts about this experiment. Today when we arrived at the Hjelm house it was only 50 degrees! Brrrrrr! We were also down to a team of six following Ben’s last day on Friday and Stuart and Gretel heading back to Illinois over the weekend. (Abby was gone for her senior pictures). With so few people we got off to a quick start, because we knew we would need all the time we could get to get as much done with fewer crew members. Our skeleton crew headed out to p2 to continue measuring that we started last Thursday. It was slow going but, having gotten through the thickest of the flowering plants on Thursday it was faster than it could have been. It is always windy at p2 since it is on top of a hill but today was especially windy and cold, most crew members could barely feel their hands which made entering data on the visor a challenge. We managed to get by, completing 20 rows before heading in for lunch. After a warm up with some hot chocolate at lunch we headed out to do various things in the afternoon. Danny, Amy, Gina and I went to harvest heads in the remnants based on a sampling method that Danny and Amy developed. Ali and Katherine rechecked some funky measurements in p1 and harvested a few of the heads that will be used in the q3 experiment (exciting!). Amy and I went to a ton of different remnants and encountered a few problems, like at Stevens approach were most of the heads were mowed. The highlight of our afternoon was at Aanenson where we met a really friendly cow named Willow! she came up to the fence and let us pet her. Her not-so-outgoing friends were hesitant and we didn’t pet them. Willow even gave Amy’s hand a lick, “it felt really weird” said Amy shortly after the licking. Sadly we could not spend all afternoon with our new friend and went to continue harvesting.  Willow the cow investigates her new, soon-to-be friends, Will and Amy  Willow’s friends investigate us from afar, clearly not as outgoing or cool as Willow. The days and weeks are starting to fly by as we get into the busy part of the summer. Nearing the end of July, it seems like we’re hovering right around the peak of the flowering season for Echinacea angustifolia. In addition to keeping up with the phenology for our flowers (roughly a couple thousand across our remnants alone!), we’re also making timely progress on independent projects and getting important work done on the q3 experiment. We got off to a quick start this morning sending half the crew out to do phenology at a handful of sites while Danny and Amy continued their work assessing compatibility across remnant flowers and still a few others collected pollen at Staffanson for q3. While phenology is proving to be quite the time commitment right now, we’re slowly (and satisfyingly) starting to be able to check the “Done flowering” box for more and more of our flowers. The flowering season is tapering off much faster than I had expected!  A cross-pollinator’s eye view of a well-organized team carrying out crosses in p1. The bright and breezy afternoon had most of the team out in p1 doing pollen crosses for q3. Stuart debuted a new system for keeping us organized in the field as we share, swap, switch, and track down the right vials of sire pollen to be applied to the p1 dams. While the fits of wind that persisted for much of the afternoon were a nice way to cool down, it was not very much appreciated when the breeze swept away the valuable bits of pollen we were trying to apply to our flowers! The day ended with a visit from some of the parents of the crew members and local science teachers (these two groups actually had quite a bit of overlap). These visits were timed excellently for our guests to appreciate the Echinacea in all their peak flowering glory.  Bagged and painted Echinacea ready to be cross-pollinated. This project investigates the role of three fundamental constraints on mate availability – temporal asynchrony, spatial isolation, and reproductive incompatibility – in remnant Echinacea angustifolia populations. During the summer of 2014, we conducted two studies related to The Mating Scene project. In the first study, we mapped 991 Echinacea plants and monitored the phenology of 1360 flowering heads across 31 remnants to quantify spatial isolation and flowering asynchrony. At the end of the season, we harvested 193 flowering heads from 25 remnants to assess seed set. In the second study, we performed 364 pollen crosses to characterize patterns of reproductive incompatibility within 10 remnants. With the data collected in 2014 and subsequent years, we aim to elucidate how the interactions between temporal asynchrony, spatial isolation, and reproductive incompatibility influence reproductive fitness in fragmented prairie remnants.
Start year: 2014 Location: Phenology in 31 total remnants, compatibility in 10 remnants Products: The phenology and compatibility datasets need to be made readyR. The harvested flowering heads are being processed at the Chicago Botanic Garden. Overlaps with: phenology in six remnants, fire and flowering at SPP Today was a great day for Team Echinacea! After a quick morning of remnant phenology, we finished measuring Lydia’s Experimental Plot 09!!! On the Northwest Phenology Route, all flowering Echinacea at East Elk Lake Road and North West of Landfill have finished flowering. It is pretty cool to think of how long we have been returning to these sites for phenology, and now many of them are wrapping up (and quickly!). In the afternoon Elizabeth, Gretel, Jared and I were busy working on demography at East Riley, Riley, Railroad Crossing, and North of Railroad Crossing. Other team members went to KJ’s to look for seedlings that teams have been following in years past. On the pollinator note comes a follow up from Steve Ellis’s talk with us last Friday. I recently came to learn that the city of Shorewood, MN has passed a law banning the use of neonicotinoids!!!! Shorewood now joins the all too small list of cities banning neonics, including Eugene, Oregon and Spokane, Washington. Although this is a small step towards protecting the bees, Shorewood has made a very important statement. Check out the Star Tribune article about the recent ban, along with a post on the Beyond Pesticides Daily News Blog! http://www.startribune.com/local/west/269627281.html
Today we spent the morning doing remnant phenology. It seems that we are getting to the end of flowering and phenology is going faster and faster. During phenology we collected pollen that will be freeze dried and used for crosses next summer! Woah! While I was collecting pollen from the single flowering plant at the DOG site, the elusive three legged dog came to visit me. She fell down by me and panted while I collected the pollen. In the afternoon we furiously measured Experimental Plot 1. Gretel and I raced other groups aswell as each other, finishing four rows before we called it a day and headed in. Today marked the first weekday of the peak week of flowering for Echinacea. We are working on phenology at all the remnants as will as P1. Several flowers are already on their last day of flowering. Despite the cold and blustery conditions of today the team did crosses for the compatibility project at Loeffler’s Corner and set up the project at East Elk Lake Road. Cam and I worked on my exhaustive crossing project at Yellow Orchid Hill. We weren’t able to collect pollen and cross until after lunch, but fortunately the pollen was not blown away by the wind! Tomorrow will be more phenology and compatibility! Today was a big day for remnant phenology surveys–possibly our biggest of the season. We made the process more efficient by not recording style persistence on flowers on their 3rd, 6th, 7th, and 8th days of flowering. But we didn’t stop there. We also collected pollen, painted bracts, and performed the first crosses with the 10 focal plants at Riley. Each focal plant was crossed with its nearest neighbor, its farthest neighbor within the remnant, the earliest flowering plant, and the latest flowering plant. This is to help us understand how compatibility varies across space and flowering time. In other news, Will and I saw an immature bald eagle amongst the gulls and turkey vultures at the landfill. |
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